Equal and Negative Orbits
by katilara
Summary: Ruminations on the Spike, Julia, Vicious lovehate triangle. Spike always had these thoughts when he and Julia were lying together, coming down from the high of each other.


**A/N: **Written for a friend who wanted Spike, Julia and Vicious and their love-hate relationship. Sort of a side story to the Tharsis Sforzando. I really should get to work on that, yeah?

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The solar system only had one sun. Spike had heard theories and rumours that it was possible for a solar system to have more than one source of life, but he knew for certain that his didn't. He also knew that as a result, those objects that revolved around the source that was there had to share the attention. As a result, those objects that were the farthest away received less of that attention.

The planets, the worlds that he and Vicious and Julia kept in the core of themselves, might have been okay if they hadn't found the comfort of orbit. The planets would have been cold, and dark, and tangled as they always had been. They would have remained as they had been meant to be. If they had never known warmth, had never had to share it, they would have all been okay.

Spike always had these thoughts when he and Julia were lying together, coming down from the high of each other. Julia lit a cigarette and inhaled, causing the tip to glow and smolder in the dark. The gesture wasn't lost on Spike, who watched the flare and then closed his eyes. He tried to hold them shut tight to see how long the light would remain captured and burned onto his retinas. It was never long enough.

When he opened his eyes again she smiled down at him and passed the torch his way. He took it from her gently, as it was the only way he was able to move around her, and took his own drag. He tried to pull in as much of the light and toxic heat as he could. He would have inhaled her if it had been at all possible. He'd tried. Instead he contented himself with being wrapped around her in the sweat soaked sheets and breathing in the smoke and the smell of roses that always clung to her.

"He doesn't know, does he," Spike said around the cigarette as it dangled from his lips, the tip bobbed dangerously close to her skin and he studied the orange reflection on the white expanse.

She cocked her head and looked at him. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I'm still alive."

She sighed and plucked the cigarette from his fingers. She brought it back up to her lips. "You two, the both of you. I don't know why I still let the two of you surprise me. You're just a like." She laid the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table and then slid out of his grasp. She slunk to the bathroom, her pale body in the black room moved like the smoke that still floated from the tip. It blurred at the edges and Spike closed his eyes.

He tried to maintain her form in his mind but the image of the white shifted and changed. It was hair then, hair that hung heavy around a narrow face and pale eyes and more smoke that drifted around the head. Vicious always had a halo in Spike's mind, a haze. Spike viewed Vicious as the point farthest out from the sun with the darkness of black holes nipping at his heels. Vicious had always been that way. Spike was sure he preferred it. Spike knew this because he loved him, or some emotion much like that. He didn't know for sure, it was something men didn't talk about, even if it was only a feeling of kinship.

When Spike and Vicious tried to orbit each other they only collided, it had been that way since the early days. The darkness held by one always magnified itself upon the darkness of the other. Their love turned to hate and turned back again, the titration resulting in new emotions that no one understood. But they got their jobs done, and they always came back alive, so no one cared. No one cared about either of them until Julia.

Julia loved them and she hated them. And Spike thought that maybe that was the way it had to be. After all, he and Vicious loved and hated each other, and they loved and hated themselves. They told themselves that the emotion they had for her was love, but they hated the part of her that was in love with the other. It had become impossible for them to separate the emotions.

And so they swung in equal and negative orbits around her. They fought for attention and light and warmth. She was the thing that wilted their tangles and drove out their darkness. She was the thing that caused the tangles and darkness to return again twice as thick and twice as dense whenever she upset the balance, pulled one of them into closer orbit.

Spike's solar system only had one sun, and it did more damage than it did good. A barren planet that tasted life became addicted to it and would hold on to it at all costs. Spike and Vicious disregarded everything else they knew, they hated the things in each other that reminded them of themselves. They hated the things that Julia might love about them. They pulled against the magnetism that held them together and hoped that one of them would fly off into orbit. Neither of them really cared which it would be, they only knew that their source couldn't support two planets indefinitely. They knew that if they didn't cease to orbit that they would only get pulled closer together. They would only get pulled closer to her heat and her spark.

Spike opened his eyes and watched as the cigarette flared around the filter and the last bit of it was consumed. It would happen to them too, as sure as those god forsaken hunks of rock orbited the sun. The closer they got, the more they'd be unable to pull away, the harder it would be to not collide with one another. Eventually they'd all be consumed by the light, by the fire of love and heat of hate. Eventually all that would remain of any of them would be darkness. Spike closed his eyes again and listened as she hummed on her way back to the bed. She spilled back in next to him, coalescing like warm smoke in cold air, and kissed him softly on the forehead and mouth. Her warm breath ghosted over his skin and reawakened pores and cells he had forgotten existed.

He wrapped his arms around her and thought that the dark wouldn't be so bad, the cold like this. The memory of warmth and the remnants of emotion that would break apart and drift off into space, commingling with each other so that none of the three would be able to tell which part belonged to whom. Love and hate and Vicious and Julia and Spike and none of it would matter, because eventually they would all burn.


End file.
